


one-man winter

by dirtybinary



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Sad Ending, mentions of torture, probably inaccurate neuroscience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-06 23:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3152099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some of the Winter Soldier's handlers are kinder than others. Those generally don't stay alive for very long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one-man winter

**Author's Note:**

> Written for evil nonny's prompt:  
>  _When the Asset is taken out of Cryo a young scientist (let's not make him a skinny blond for a change) attempts to rescue him. They almost make it outside, but obviously (see CA: TWS), the Asset was captured again and the kind, remorseful scientist had to pay for his compassion with his life. When he is next taken out of Cryo, the Winter Soldier remembers nothing._
> 
> In other words: HELLA ANGST AHEAD.

He remembers this part.

The maw of the cryo tank gapes open like a lidless eye, deep and shadowed and stinking of chemicals. He is to strip off his clothes and lay himself down inside, like a corpse in a coffin. The door will crank shut over him with a rattle like gunfire. Then the cold will come—gradual, gentle, relentless—and fill him whole, until his heart stops beating and all the world comes to a standstill.

(It doesn’t, of course. It just slows down long enough for him to get off. The Soldier likes the thought of that. There is safety, of a sort, and peace, of a very circumscribed nature, inside the one-man winter of cryofreeze.)

He makes to take off his shirt, but the doctor stops him with a gesture. The doctor’s job is to disengage his arm and take it off for safekeeping before he gets into the tank, and to keep him quiet if he doesn’t feel like going to sleep today. Instead he hands the Soldier even _more_ clothes—a civilian jacket, and a scarf—and a couple of pistols. He himself, the Soldier notes, is also carrying a gun, and a profusion of sweat glistens on his brow. “It’s time,” he says, in an abrupt way that suggests that they have spoken about this before. “Everyone’s gone.”

The Soldier is vaguely peeved. He’d wanted to go to sleep. But obedience is ingrained into his nature, and he takes the clothes and the guns from the man. “What is my mission?”

“To escape,” says the doctor.

 

 

The death of Arnim Zola is the best thing to ever happen to the Winter Soldier, at least that he can remember. For one thing, databanks are a good bit less portable than a flesh-and-blood person, which means that the erstwhile head of HYDRA’s medical division now spends more time whirring and glowing alone in a control room than poking around in the Soldier’s body. (His servers are still a little bit unstable, so Zola’s disembodied presence suffers the occasional mishap, such as the glorious system failure that once had him speaking gibberish for three days straight. The Red Room girls had gone into paroxysms of laughter to hear it, and make it a point to constantly remind the Soldier of the event, which still gives him a fearful sort of amusement when considered at arm’s length.)

For another thing, that means the Soldier gets to have a new doctor.

He goes through plenty, but the one they eventually settle on is young and clearly a civilian, all soft around the edges: a little plump and prone to nervous tics, but with smiling eyes and gentle hands. He snaps at the technicians a lot and keeps up a constant stream of chatter while he works. _How does this feel, James? Does it hurt? All right, I’ll give you something to make it better. I know you hate needles but it’ll be fast. Stick out your arm—not that arm, James, you smartass, don’t be funny._

The Soldier does not make a habit of learning the names of his support staff. Privately he calls them things like Flat Ass or Wart with Glasses. The doctor is kind to him, so the Soldier refers to him simply as Doctor. In return the doctor calls him James, for no reason other than that it is written on the first page of his file, even though the Soldier can find no emotional significance from his limited repository of memories to attach to the name. It is a point of contention between the doctor and his other handlers, all of whom seem very alarmed when proper nouns are applied to the Soldier. He can’t think why. Perhaps he has an allergy.

In any case, he makes sure to respond swiftly and with exaggerated acquiescence any time the doctor calls him James, and to smash a great many things whenever someone else is sent to tend to him. Very soon, he sees more of the doctor than the rest of his team put together, and no one else is allowed to come near him when he is hurt or misbehaving.

His handlers learn quickly. The Soldier knows how to play this game, too.

 

 

They slip out of the lab, up the stairs and onto ground level. The Soldier is not entirely sure of the parameters of this mission, except that the kind doctor is going somewhere and no one must see him and so the Soldier must come along to help kill anyone who does. He is very good at killing, and for some reason even better at protecting. When they run into one of the techs in the main hallway the Soldier does not hesitate to shoot him in the heart, and the doctor swears and sweats some more. He says, “You should go on ahead. I’ll distract the others.”

The Soldier does not understand. His job is to protect, and he can hardly do that if he is split up from his charge. “No,” he says. “Not compatible with mission objective.”

The doctor calls him a smartass and grumbles some more, but doesn’t insist. They run down the hall and let themselves out of the building by the back door, and that is when the sirens start blaring and every light in the place comes on.

 

 

The doctor is extra kind to him after a beating or a wipe. The Soldier cannot help but despise him a little at those times, because he doesn’t _do_ anything, just stands at the back of the room and mops his brow and looks put out. The Soldier always finds himself hoping he would step forward and tell them to stop, until he remembers that the man is a doctor, and doctors have no work unless there are wounds and maladies to tend. Besides, Zola chose this man personally as his successor, or so he hears; so what good can come of trusting him?

But afterwards, as he lies shuddering in a heap of misery and ill will, the doctor always brings him candy—smuggled in his pockets and in his med kit, under a roll of bandages—and injects him with things that make him stop hurting. The Soldier likes the chocolate best. He knows this because it smells a certain way, all rich and deep and magnificent, and the doctor tells him that olfactory information—unlike sight and hearing and all the rest—is not relayed through the thalamus, which is a thing in his brain that Zola tampered with so it would not send signals to another thing called the hippocampus. He wonders if this is why the doctor always wears so much cologne.

“It’s not right,” the doctor mutters one time, stitching up a long, bloody cut on his back. “The way they treat you, it’s awful. It’s not right at all.”

Placid now, with a mouth full of sticky toffee, the Soldier hums tunelessly in assent. The doctor reaches up to touch his hair, a move that seems to serve no purpose since it neither hurts him nor helps him, but it appears to comfort the doctor and that means it must be a good thing. When the doctor steps back again his jaw is set and his round shoulders seem broader, and his eyes are no longer smiling, but hard with resolve.

 

 

Behind the barbed wire fence that surrounds the facility is freedom, or so the doctor says. The Soldier is not sure what good freedom is, since he can neither eat it nor kill people with it, but it seems extremely important to the doctor and so it is important to him as well. They will reach that fence and he will throw his jacket over the barbed wire and give the doctor a leg up, and then, if the doctor permits, he will scramble over as well.

But they are still twenty strides short of the fence when the gunshots begin. The doctor shouts, “Run!” and turns, not even trembling, to face the guards. The Soldier has never in his life been ordered to run and can’t see why he ought to obey now. He pulls out his pistols and returns fire, stepping forward to cover the doctor with his body. He remembers, too late, that he has stripped off his Kevlar for the tank and is wearing only the jacket and a thin shirt beneath. The bullets rock into him, leg and stomach and human arm, and he sways and nearly falls over. The doctor is down, too, bleeding on all fours. The Soldier becomes aware that he is angry. He fires until both his pistols are empty, and throws all his knives, and—when the guards start to close in—seizes the closest one and snaps his neck clean in two with precise metal fingers. Then the next closest, and the third. Then the pain becomes so overwhelming that his vision swims, and there are bodies piled all around him, and the doctor cannot help him because soon he, too, will be dead.

“I am sorry,” the Soldier says. The buoyant rage is gone, leaving only a restless sadness. He cannot remember whose idea it was to escape, but it seems obvious to him now that it was never going to work. “I wanted to taste freedom, and see if it was like chocolate.”

“You complete idiot,” says the doctor. A pause for breath, a glance behind the Soldier; and then, incongruously, he whispers, “When he asks you to kill me, do it.”

 

 

His handlers come running out with their starched suits and ashen faces. One of them is holding a device out of which Zola’s voice is emanating, along with an eerie green glow. The man hits something on the device that makes the Soldier’s arm start to power down. “Stand down, Soldier,” says Zola’s voice, and if the Soldier were not out of bullets he would have shot the thing. “I see that this man turned you against those who cared for you and nourished you. I cannot have that. Disorder must be punished. I want you to kill him.”

One of his handlers puts a fresh gun down on the floor and kicks it over to him. The Soldier knows, without having to look, that there will be exactly one bullet in the chamber. He contemplates using it on himself instead. But the doctor wheezes beside him, and he thinks, _no, that would be betrayal_. There are quick deaths and there are slow ones. The good doctor is in pain, and if the Soldier balks they will hurt him even more. With modern technology he could still be alive and hurting years from now, long after the Soldier has gone to the chair and forgotten all of this.

Weighed against this: one bullet, nice and clean, to the back of the head. The brainstem consists of, among other things, the pons and medulla oblongata. Breathing and heartbeat will stop immediately. It will not hurt. The doctor knows this.

The Soldier does as he is told. Then, in a rare show of defiance, he flings the gun away and sits down cross-legged by the doctor’s body, and does not move until the guards come with tranquilisers to take him to the chair.

 

 

He remembers this part.

The maw of the cryo tank gapes open, like a lidless eye. He strips his clothes off and lays himself down inside. The door cranks shut over him with a rattle like gunfire. In a moment the cold will come—gradual, gentle, relentless—and all the world will shudder to a standstill.

There is no candy today. He wonders why.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) or check out my [gay arch-nemeses novel](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/149576789996/an-elegy-info-post)!


End file.
